What is the first thing that comes to your mind, when you think of signs of a good app for placing your ads? Our guess would be: raging popularity, huge audience, high stickiness and engagement. It’s natural. Because maximum exposure is what advertisers want for their brand.

Moment, an app that tracks how users spend time with their phones, shared some data giving us a new angle on the subject.

Average daily time spend of half a million users was cross-referenced with data reported by 4% of them about how happy or unhappy they felt with each app. It turned out that the apps we use to organize our daily routines (to-do lists, calendars, traffic assistants) leave the happiest feeling and take the least amount of time.

One more cluster of ‘happy apps’ that run in the background and don’t take a lot of ‘focused time’ included entertainment apps (Spotify, Podcasts and such).

What about social networks and messengers, aren’t they supposed to take us to cloud nine? Luckily for Skype and FaceTime that ranked high on ‘time spend’ scale, their users reported high level of happiness. While Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Reddit seems like a huge waste of time - with low happiness and high time spend scores. Their magical time-killing ability, however, makes users feel discontented: they spend hours scrolling through feeds or photos, but don’t get any long-term benefit from that.

It is no news to read about social networks’ detrimental effect on personality. For example, one of the recent studies revealed that getting a lot of Facebook likes for your photo or media post doesn’t make you any happier.

Why does it matter for marketing?

Marketers aim at creating a positive link between customer and brand, and ‘happy apps’ are one of the best environment for that.

Feeling of happiness that people experience while using such apps spreads to any ‘selling’ message they get and also puts them in the mood for social sharing.

So the bottomline is: don’t look for apps that are addictive and take a lot of time, better stick with those where people spend less time, but this short time is valuable and happy-making.